The American economy is built on intellectual property. The US Patent and Trademark Office estimates that 41% of US gross domestic product comes from IP-intensive industries. From podcasters to influencers to newspapers, intellectual property enhances freedom of speech and encourages creative processes and investments in quality productions.
Although artificial intelligence companies recognize this quality, unfortunately they have chosen to use the intellectual property of others to fuel their products. Currently, the Chinese AI app Deepseek is telling us how much it costs these highly AI companies by using creativity and intelligence.
The country flourished by encouraging experiments and legally protecting results, but as technology has changed over the past decades, new decisions are needed to adapt our laws to new technologies. is.
So for the first time on Thursday, a diverse group of news and magazine members from the News/Media Alliance came together to suicidate the AI company. For that user.
Plaintiffs include Advance Local Media (the parent company of this website), CondéNast, The Atlantic, Forbes Media, The Guardian, Business Insider, The Los Angeles Times, McClatchy Media Co., Newsday, Plain Dealer Publishing Co., Politico, The Republican Co., Toronto Star Newspapers, Vox Media.
The lawsuit accuss Cohere Inc., a rapidly growing AI company, of not trying to hide the fact that it lifts up content and offers it for free.
Details of the news/media alliance lawsuit against Cohere Inc.
Cohere has achieved a valuation of over $5 billion through large and systematic copyright and trademark infringement of media content. The Canadian company flaunts evidence and provides its own receipts. As documented in the lawsuit, in a feature called “Under the Hood,” Cohere shows the sources that it copied to provide output up to the timestamp of the copy, including the full copy. .
Cohere offers users verbatim reflux, complete alternative summaries, and breaking news coverage. Thursday’s complaint alleges thousands of cases of infringement, up to the time stamp of the copy.
There’s nothing subtle about many of the actions that Cohere thinks are theft. Suit details verbatim lifting of articles and even posting stories within an hour of publication. For example, when asked about a specific article for October 2024 on the LA Times, Cohere delivered the entire article verbatim with just a few words and punctuation changes.
When asked in general about financial tensions in the Miami-Dade County public transport system, Cohere provided a full article from the Miami Herald, with only minor changes to the first sentence. At another prompt, Cohere was asked to provide the text for the Forbes article.
Media companies are not anti-technology
Litigation can be long and expensive, but there is no option. We’ve tried everything over the years – digitally book or mark content as off limits for bots and scrapers, update terms and conditions, work directly with tech companies, and return a bit of traffic using the content They claim to get and sometimes even pay for it.
Nevertheless, overwhelming profits have led to AI companies, and as a media business, we leave only a small portion of the value our own content has produced.
The lawsuit coincides with the brave example of the New York Times. The New York Times is suing Openai and Microsoft for misuse of articles in generated AI products. New Actors and Unauthorized Uses – Enforce our rights and stop other AI companies from stealing content.
This is not a counter-litigation or an effort to turn the clock back. We love technology. We use it in our business. Artificial intelligence only provides services that are appropriate to you if you respect intellectual property. That’s the remedy we seek in court.
When that suits them, AI companies will make similar claims from us. Mehta’s lawsuit accused the bright data of shaking its data in violation of its terms of use. And Sam Altman of Openai complains that Deepseek illegally copied the algorithm.
Excellent actors, responsible skills, and potential laws provide hope for improving the situation. But what is urgently needed is what every market needs. It provides enhanced legal protection against theft.
Danielle Coffey is president and CEO of News/Media Alliance and represents 2,000 news and magazine media outlets around the world.
